


The Lion Tamer and the Ring of Fire

by TurduckenSandwich



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dystopia, F/M, Sexual Tension, cops and robbers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 16:58:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurduckenSandwich/pseuds/TurduckenSandwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meg is a thief. That's all she's been ever since she learned that believing in something bigger than herself is a quick ticket to hell. But Detective Inspector Castiel Milton is about to mess up all her best-laid plans - for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lion Tamer and the Ring of Fire

As the city's greatest jewel thief, Meg had been in a few pickles before. A master, after all, was not a master because she never made a mistake, but because of her utterly peerless error recovery. And Meg was going to think of a way out of this mess any moment now. She had infiltrated this mansion bedroom thinking that it contained the Kali Diamond, only to find nothing but Detective Inspector Castiel Milton and a set of iron doors that slammed themselves shut the moment she entered. There had been no red flags when she heard about the job, and she needed the money - security didn't come cheap these days. Now here they were, pacing wary circles about each other, and she was about the closest she had ever come to fucked.

In more ways than one, she thought, as Castiel's long fingers reached to his own neck, working loose the knot of his tie. Maybe he was going to tie her up. Maybe she wasn't going to try to stop him. 

"Don't bother trying to flee, Meg Masters," he said. There was just a hint of a smile on that pretty face of his. She couldn't remember if the reason she'd first been interested in him was his looks, or the way he never seemed bothered when she snatched treasure after treasure out from under the long nose of the law. Maybe it was both.

"Do you actually think that's my real name?" She tried to keep her voice light, casual, but a little bit of a snarl bled through. She had to distract him - provoke him. She had to escape. She was never going back to the way things had been, when the protection of the gang had been the only thing between her and the police. There was no one left there she trusted, with her father dead and the big boss in the Cage. Meg was alone, and she had just about convinced herself she liked it that way.

"I know it is," he said, and she had barely a moment to be pissed that he had _found out_ before he struck.

They went down fighting, knotted together in a tangle of limbs and spitting rage. He didn't hold a thing back - he knew better to, against her. She scratched his face. He put an elbow in her solar plexus. She kneed him in the balls. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head back and suddenly she realized that all the two of them had really succeeded at doing was getting each others' shirts open. Even a glimpse of the pale, toned body he'd apparently been hiding away beneath his cheap suits drove her heartbeat wild.

There was a hitch in his breath, just the slightest arrhythmia, and she realized that she might not be the only one who felt way in over her head.

So with an effort of will, she let all the fight leave her body, and suddenly the grapple was an embrace, and every part of her that had ever wanted to be touching part of him - was. Cas gasped, tried to pull away, but it was so much easier to draw him in than it ever had been to keep him away, and he wasn't even trying to run from her. His arms on either side of her head, one of his long legs just so between hers, eyes locked on each others' - this was good, Meg thought, this was better than good, had she been so bad all her life that she didn't deserve more of this? Well - maybe she had, but that's not how wanting works.

"Come on, Detective Inspector," she murmured, her breath hot against his lips. "I think we should be able to make a deal."

"A deal requires both sides to want something from the other."

His eyes, she thought, his eyes were so bright they were going to burn her away. And everything she'd ever wondered about him, those idle musings that occupied her mind in the deep night of her hideaways in the slums, was a sharp question now.

Was he good? Was he pure? Was he bad, worse than she could ever be? She had seen him violent, seen him naive, seen him gentle. She'd seen him refuse a bribe with the cold contempt of a true believer in high and mighty Justice and then open up a jail cell to let her free just because the Winchester boys said it might be a good idea - and everyone knew what kind of lawless scum they were. She had seen him shoot down three of her old colleagues without breaking a sweat, and then get laughed at by his friends a moment later for not getting their dirty jokes. Power without bravado. Belief without fanaticism. Loyalty without hope.

There is, she thought, no one like you. She didn't say it. Instead she said, "Are you saying, Detective Inspector, that you can't think of anything at all you want from me?"

She wriggled her hips against him, just to be sure he understood. She'd seen him miss innuendoes a ten-year-old would have laughed at in her part of town.

One long, perfect finger alighted on her lips, and stilled her. God, what was that look in his eyes, just there at the corners? Where had the violence gone? Burn me up, she thought. Don't look at me like you understand. Because you don't. Someone like you could never understand someone like me, and that's the only thing I have over you.

"What I want from you, Meg, is your help," he said softly. "And I know that you will give it."

"What kind of help could _you_ need from me?"

By way of answer, he got to his feet, and offered her a hand up in turn. She tossed her head at him, defiant, and sat on the bed. Already she missed the heat of his body above hers, but what did it matter? Out of the corner of his eye, she noticed that his dark hair was hopelessly mussed. God, hadn't anyone ever told him that policemen were supposed to look the part?

"My people…" he said. Paused. The words seemed to trouble him, even as he spat them out. "The police are corrupt."

"Yeah, tell me something everyone doesn't know," she sneered. At least my kind aren't hypocrites, even if they aren't my kind anymore. Even if I'm the only one left who still believes that we could have been something more than criminals - which makes me the last hypocrite standing, she thought, and the bitter taste in her mouth was a reminder that she didn't miss her people so much as she missed knowing for sure that she was one of them.

"Not like that," he said. "Not like they have been. I'm not talking about skimming the top off the protection money your people take from the citizenry, or any mere bribes. I'm talking about the end of the world as we know it. About the police deciding that they don't need the government to tell them what to do anymore."

"That's -" Insane? Not at all. Not given the way things had been the last decade. The police were the ones with the big guns and the hot cybernetics, and if they just decided they were sick of it all - "How? Specifically, how?"

"Step one," he murmured. "Step one… Lucifer gets out of the Cage."

She flinched. The big boss. He was supposed to be away until the end of time, and that was the only guarantee she had… her people might be willing to ignore her falling away from the ranks. But the boss never would. If he came back, if the man she'd once sworn her all to returned - her life wouldn't be worth a red penny. Maybe nobody's would, given Lucifer's taste for slaughter.

"The people would never accept that," she said. "He was tried and convicted, and hell, even most of my old gang are glad to see him gone -"

"You're right. The higher-ups, they can't open the Cage themselves. So they need a scapegoat. Someone good enough to get Lucifer out and foolish enough to think that they're doing it of their own volition."

"Who the hell is that crazy?" she demanded, but she knew the answer before she even finished asking the question. "Oh, fuck. Fuck the fucking Winchesters."

"We don't have much time," he said, pacing to the steel-glass window. The glittering city was spread before them. It looked good like this, pristine, with the nighttime to hide everything that didn't shine on its own. "Sam is - he's already laid his plans, and given the state he's in, he's not going to listen to reason. My people have let him - no, made him - but it doesn't matter. Dean wants to stop him, but he doesn't know how, he isn't sure of himself. And I've wasted so much time. I have - doubted."

Doubt was poison, Meg thought. Everyone knew that, no matter what side they're on. Doubt was poison, until suddenly it was all you knew, and you believed in something you thought you despised an instant before. And then you drank in doubt like wine, and your head spun with it.

"Always willing to bleed for the Winchesters, aren't you?" she said, wondering if she could get enough contempt into her voice. She wasn't bitter, not at all.

"Always," he said. There was love in his eyes. She remembered that she never believed in the cause she once espoused, so much as she believed in the father who taught it to her, in the brothers and sisters who fought by her side. And when they became corpses and prisoners and traitors, each and every one, so too became her faith.

Part of her was screaming. This was going to be the end of her. Don't do it. Don't get suckered in by his baby blues and the way he says your name. You'll die for this, much surer than he will, and you know for a fact he's doomed.

"Why do you think I'll help you?" She stood up, stalking over to him. He was taller, but it was still so easy to get in his face. "Why me?"

He blinked at her. "I don't know. I… I couldn't ask my colleagues. I don't know who to trust."

"You don't trust me," she said, a simple statement of fact.

"Of course not." He looked down, and then right at her. Wide blue eyes, and you could believe that he was innocent as a child if you didn't know so much better. Had he not considered the question? Had he just come to her, trapped her here, rather, without thinking of why she was the one?

It wasn't fair, she thought, not fair at all that this was how he would bring her down.

"All right," she said. "All right."

"Thank you, Meg." Courtesy. Well, that wasn't what she wanted at all. He rapped a pattern on one of the lockdown doors, and they slowly ascended. They were free to leave.

"You know, I'd rather you'd just wanted a quick screw in exchange for letting me go," she said, lying, and not very well, but fortunately he was Detective Inspector Castiel Milton, and bringing sex into it was an easy way to win.

"Meg!" He sounded scandalized. Glancing around - of course, there had to be other police about to lay a trap like this - he murmured, blue eyes so piercingly sincere, "Why on earth do you think it would have been a _quick_ screw?"

Oh, yeah, Meg thought. Fucked was really the only word for it.

**Author's Note:**

> As I wrote this, it turned from a quick borderline-smutty drabble into something that could be the beginnings of a much larger AU. Think a dystopian future city (it's always a dystopian future city, ok, and for good reason) with the demons as criminal gangs, the angels as the police, Sam and Dean Winchester standing up for what they would think of as the ordinary person, Cas a detective with doubts, and Meg a runaway who's abandoned her old gang when they fell apart after Azazel's death and Lucifer's imprisonment.
> 
> Yeah, the chances that I'll actually write any of that are minimal, but hey.


End file.
